Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future Podcast Por Douglas Stuart McDaniel arte de portada

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

De: Douglas Stuart McDaniel
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Welcome to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel—author, innovation veteran, and accidental urbanist—exploring the forces shaping the cities of tomorrow. It’s not just a conversation—it’s a call to action. Here, we challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas, and rethink what cities can be—both now and in the future.

multiversethinking.substack.comDouglas Stuart McDaniel Ciencia
Episodios
  • Premium Pulp Fiction S1:E4 Ukrainian Philosophy and Poetry Put on a Spacesuit

    Premium Pulp Fiction S1:E4 Ukrainian Philosophy and Poetry Put on a Spacesuit
    Feb 12 2026
    In this episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction podcast, my guest is Maksym Van Shamrai — millennial novelist, cultural theorist, and Ukrainian expat.In 2010, Maks had just finished his doctoral studies in Kyiv. His thesis examined something called cultural anthropocentrism — the idea that humans are both the authors of culture and the products of it. Heavy stuff. The kind of thing you wrap in abstract philosophical language until nobody understands it anymore.Then he attended a lecture on the role of poetry in forming personality. At the end, confused by the jargon, he asked the speaker to explain it simply.She smiled and said: “Poetry helps the heart think when the brain is tired.”That sentence cracked something open. Maks realized his ideas about humanity, memory, power, and meaning didn’t want to stay inside academic language anymore. They wanted characters. Danger. Conflict. Emotion.“2010 became the moment,” Maks told me on this week’s podcast, “when my philosophy quietly put on a spacesuit and stepped into fiction.”A Book That Lived Several LivesScions of the Last Hope began in Ukraine under a different title — The Last Crew — written first in Russian, the everyday language of southern Ukraine at the time. By 2011, Maks had moved to Spain, diving deeper into art and culture, meeting the love of his life, learning Spanish at the government language school in Vigo. The manuscript paused at chapter seven. He was absorbing rather than creating.Then came 2022.When the sirens sounded in Kyiv, Maks was working on chapter eleven. Something opened inside him. The book wasn’t just philosophical anymore — it became deeply emotional. He finished the manuscript in Ukrainian, then translated the entire novel into Spanish himself. Not with Google Translate. With dictionaries, with his Spanish family, with random guys at the calisthenics park who could tell him how young people actually spoke.“It was quite a challenge,” he said. “Asking people, asking my family, my friends — which was quite a nice journey.”He wanted to publish first in Ukraine, his home. But Ukrainian publishers had been hit by missiles. The infrastructure was gone. So Spain became the path forward. The Spanish edition, Vástagos de la Última Esperanza, was released in 2025 by Caligrama, an imprint of Penguin Random House.And now Premium Pulp Fiction has acquired the English-language rights.What Survives When a Story Crosses BordersOne of the things I pushed Maks on during our conversation was voice. How do you carry an Eastern European literary sensibility — with its space for silence, moral tension, slow philosophical moments — into English, a language that often rewards acceleration?His answer was precise: “I didn’t want to sound very Spanish or German or whatever. I wanted to sound Ukrainian. Eastern European.”That’s not about being different for its own sake. It’s about protecting the philosophical heart of the book. Scions of the Last Hope isn’t just a space adventure with explosions and heroes. It explores what Maks calls “biopolitical science fiction” — questions about power over human life itself. Who is allowed to live? Whose memory is preserved? Which version of humanity gets a future?These questions need space. They need reflection, not just fast action.“If I remove that deeper, quieter layer,” he said, “the story would lose part of its meaning.”The Seed of the NovelWhen I asked Maks what the book is really about, he offered two questions that haunt the entire narrative:Can you build a new future without carrying the ghosts of the past?When systems of power and survival define humanity, what remains of the human?His answer to the second: Choice. Fragile, constrained, often punished — but not entirely erasable.That’s the seed. Set in 2136, after planetary cataclysm has plunged humanity into collapse, the story follows scientists racing to understand a distant exoplanet that might become humanity’s new home — while navigating corporate intrigue, government conspiracies, and a mystery encoded in a single prehistoric word.It’s dystopian science fiction, yes. But it’s also a reflection on identity, memory, and what it means to remain human when technology and power structures are trying to decide that for you.Eastern European RootsMaks cites Stanisław Lem, the Strugatsky Brothers, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke as influences — but also Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Arenev and Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski (yes, The Witcher). And films: Star Wars, Alien, Prometheus.What unites them? “Humanity facing the big questions,” he said. “I’m always looking for the philosophical point in every single book or movie. Even if there is no philosophical point.”He grew up in a household in Mykolaiv where his father — a professor of physics and mathematics — also played guitar, piano, and accordion, and wrote poetry that he never published. His mother taught ...
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    1 h y 3 m
  • Redlining Didn’t Disappear. It Learned New Software

    Redlining Didn’t Disappear. It Learned New Software
    Feb 6 2026
    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, I sit down with Derek Lumpkins to talk about cities and neighborhoods—but not in the way cities usually get discussed.We didn’t start with master plans or policy language. We started with Roxbury. With lived memory and 150 years of Black history. With what it means to grow up inside a neighborhood that is always being talked about, rarely talked with, and almost never trusted to define itself.Roxbury matters because it exposes something cities prefer to hide: the way stereotypes quietly stand in for governance. How assumptions about race, class, and behavior become shorthand for decisions about investment, policing, education, and opportunity. Not announced. Just understood. Embedded in tone. In posture. In who gets listened to.This is also why Derek’s work in DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—matters now more than ever, precisely because the field is under strain.What’s happening to DEI today isn’t subtle. The language remains, but the commitment is thinning. Roles are being eliminated, renamed, or buried inside HR. Expectations remain impossibly high, while power contracts. Derek describes a familiar pattern: organizations say they want honesty, but recoil when that honesty threatens comfort, hierarchy, or control.DEI has become an easy target because it forces proximity. It asks institutions to look at who benefits, who bears risk, and who has historically been excluded from decision-making. And in moments of uncertainty—economic, political, cultural—institutions tend to protect stability over introspection.What gets lost in the backlash is that DEI, at its best, was never about optics. It was about stakeholders. About whether people who live with the consequences of decisions have any real say in how those decisions are made. About whether cities, companies, and governments can move beyond symbolic inclusion toward shared accountability.In this episode, we don’t talk about DEI as a slogan or a checklist. We talk about it as a profession that has been asked to absorb institutional failure while being stripped of real authority. A field that was invited into rooms at the height of moral urgency—and is now being quietly sidelined as political winds shift and budgets tighten.Derek is candid about the toll this takes on practitioners. Many are asked to be translators, buffers, and shock absorbers—expected to carry the emotional weight of structural problems they did not create and are not empowered to fix. Burnout isn’t a failure of commitment. It’s a predictable outcome of being positioned between institutional inertia and lived reality.This is why the current moment matters more than ever.As cities face widening inequality, displacement, and distrust, retreating from equity work doesn’t make those tensions disappear. It simply removes the people trained to name them early, before they harden into crisis. When DEI is reduced to compliance or eliminated entirely, what follows isn’t neutrality—it’s silence.And silence, in cities, commonly benefits the already insulated.What Derek makes clear is that the question isn’t whether DEI “worked.” The question is whether institutions have ever been willing to let it work. Whether they are prepared to move beyond listening toward recognizing the existing agency of a plurality of stakeholders. Whether they are ready to treat marginalized communities not as problems to be managed, but as partners with legitimate claims on the future.That question doesn’t go away just because an acronym falls out of favor.From there, the conversation moved—literally and metaphorically—across borders.We talked about El Raval, my neighborhood here in Barcelona. A neighborhood that tourists experience as “gritty” or “authentic,” that inmobiliarios, or realtors here, talk about its dangers on their clickbait TikTok reels. Residents of El Raval, however, experience this district as layered, culturally rich, both vibrant and fragile, and under constant negotiation. Raval is not broken. It’s over-observed and under-protected. Like Roxbury, it’s a place where outside narratives arrive faster than local agency.That’s where travel enters the frame.One of the sharpest throughlines in this episode is how wealth functions as mobility—not just physical movement, but cognitive freedom. The ability to leave. To compare. To see that the way power operates in one city is not inevitable, just familiar. Travel exposes the lie that “this is just how things are.”For people without that mobility, stereotypes harden into destiny.We talked about Tulsa—not as a historical abstraction, but as an example of how cities remember selectively. How Black prosperity is tolerated until it isn’t. How destruction is framed as tragedy rather than policy. And how the long tail of that violence still shapes who is considered a legitimate stakeholder today.Derek is clear-eyed about this: ...
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    1 h y 18 m
  • Premium Pulp Fiction S1 E3: A Citizen One Literary Imprint

    Premium Pulp Fiction S1 E3: A Citizen One Literary Imprint
    Jan 16 2026
    Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future and—I am excited to say—Premium Pulp Fiction. I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, and before we go any further, I want to pause for a moment.We’re recording this at the start of a new year, in a world that feels simultaneously exhausted and overheated. Wars that refuse resolution. Cities under pressure from climate, inequality, and political fracture. Technologies advancing faster than our capacity to govern them. Institutions losing credibility while still holding enormous power. For many people listening, this year didn’t begin with hope so much as vigilance.That context matters.Citizen One was never meant to be escapist. It exists because moments like this demand clearer thinking, longer memory, and a willingness to stay present inside complexity rather than retreat from it. The stories we explore here—about cities, systems, culture, and power—are not abstractions. They are the environments we’re already living in, whether we’ve named them yet or not.So if you’re listening from a place of uncertainty, fatigue, or quiet resolve, you’re not alone. This space is for people who are still paying attention, still asking better questions, and still trying to understand how the future is being shaped in real time—often without our consent, but never without consequence.With that in mind, let’s step into today’s episode.Before I begin, I also wanted to share some important context with you. Citizen One is much more than a podcast. It is an emerging media brand where we explore stories at the intersection of innovation, culture, memory, and the past, present and future of cities.But today, we’re stepping into a slightly different kind of narrative frontier. I want to take a moment to introduce Premium Pulp Fiction, our Citizen One literary imprint and publishing empire.This episode is also a crossover—one that connects what we do here at Citizen One with a parallel storytelling project rooted in the same curiosity about systems, human complexity, and consequence, but expressed through fiction.It’s called Premium Pulp — an independent traditional publishing imprint where quality, depth, and risk-bearing imagination come first.At its core, Premium Pulp Fiction publishes speculative fiction, noir-inflected narratives, historical fiction, and narrative nonfiction concerned with power, memory, technology, and the quieter mechanics of how societies endure, adapt, and fail over time.Beginning this year, we will be publishing a very small number of carefully selected titles, and unlike many modern indie or hybrid publishers, we fully finance standard book production. Our authors never pay for book production or global distribution; they also receive the resources to leverage an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem built from a network of preferred, vetted, award-winning suppliers.Over the last 15–20 years, most small presses have been forced into one of three survival models:1. Author-funded or cost-sharing modelsThese include hybrid presses, “assisted publishing,” or thinly disguised vanity presses. Production costs are shifted to the author—sometimes partially, sometimes entirely—and the imprint’s role becomes administrative rather than editorial. Marketing support, when offered, is usually modular, outsourced, or pay-to-upgrade.2. Grant-subsidized or institutionally anchored pressesUniversity presses, arts-council-backed imprints, or nonprofit literary houses can sometimes fully fund authors, but they rely on external subsidy. Their marketing reach is often limited, conservative, or academically scoped, and publicity ecosystems are modest by design.3. Micro-indies operating on sweat equityThese presses finance production out of pocket, but at minimal levels—basic editing, templated design, limited print runs—and expect authors to self-market aggressively. Publicity ecosystems are informal at best and nonexistent at worst.What almost never exists anymore is a small, independent imprint that does all three of the following at once:* Fully finances production (developmental editing through distribution)* Retains editorial authority and risk (rather than transferring it to the author)* Provides an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem rather than ad-hoc supportThat model used to be normal. It was called publishing.While publishers exist across a wide range of sizes and models, the largest U.S. trade houses—commonly referred to as the Big Five—retain the scale, capital, and specialized editorial, marketing, and publicity infrastructure required to support broad distribution and coordinated campaigns at volume. Most small and independent presses operate with significantly smaller budgets and far fewer specialized departments, and as a result, authors are often expected to source, coordinate, or directly manage much of their promotional and publicity work themselves.This context is what makes...
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    13 m
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